ELSCE Undergraduate Fellows Lena Ashooh and Maddie Dowd Win 2025 Hoopes Prize

The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics is proud to announce that two of our current Undergraduate Fellows, Lena Ashooh and Maddie Dowd, have been awarded the 2025 Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize which honors exceptional senior thesis work at Harvard College.

Lena Ashooh was recognized for her thesis, “Respect: The Moral Stakes of the Animal Issue," supervised and nominated by Dr. Seth Robertson. She designed a major in animal studies, combining insights from philosophy, psychology, biology, and political science to explore the ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships. Ashooh has also been named a Rhodes Scholar for 2025.

Maddie Dowd received the Hoopes Prize for her thesis, “Imagining Other Minds: A Smithian Empathy for Animal Ethics," advised by Professor Samantha Matherne. Concentrating in Philosophy with a secondary in Human Evolutionary Biology, her intellectual interests include animal ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology. Dowd also earned a Benefactors' Scholarship this year.

We congratulate Lena and Maddie for their remarkable achievements and their contributions to ethical scholarship.